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16 October 2012

Guest post by Lori Gruen on renewal of maternal deprivation research at Madison

A few days ago Eric linked
to a report
by Lori Gruen (Ethics and Animals blog here; Wesleyan University
website here) on the renewal
of cruel maternal deprivation research on primates. The comments on Eric's post
were such that we asked Lori to write a guest post for us. She graciously
agreed; the post follows: [UPDATED 1:40 pm 16 Oct. See below for contact info for Madison's Provost.]

PAINFUL SCIENTIFIC
FOOLISHNESS

“Major
steps in scientific progress are sometimes followed closely by outbursts of foolishness.
New discoveries have a way of exciting the imagination of the well-meaning and
misguided, who see theoretical potentialities in new knowledge that may prove
impossible to attain.” – Dr.
Sherwin Nuland, Yale School of Medicine

Does the system we have in place to curtail scientific
“outbursts of foolishness” and protect research subjects from “misguided”
scientific curiosity work?

There was no oversight system in place back in the
days when Harry Harlow’s experiments psychologically tormenting baby monkeys
were making news. Surely that sort of
horrible work in which infant primates are taken from their mothers to make
them crazy wouldn’t be approved of today. On my recent visit to the University
of Wisconsin I was shocked to learn otherwise.
The oversight committee chairs told me they have never rejected a
proposal. Not one.

And one of the protocols they did not reject is a renewal
of maternal deprivation research. Disturbingly, ithas been approved by not
one, but two oversight committees. A
psychiatry professor who has a distinguished record of research on anxiety
disorders plans to separate more monkey babies from their mothers, leave them
with wire “surrogates” covered in cloth (a practice developed by Harlow) to
emulate “adverse early rearing conditions,” then pair them with another
maternally deprived infant after 3-6 weeks of being alone. The infants will then be exposed to fearful
conditions. The monkeys in this group
and another group of young monkeys who will be reared with their mothers, will
then be killed and their brains examined. (The experimental protocol is here.)

Harlow’s early maternal deprivation work at
Wisconsin led to a national outcry and was one of the motivations that prompted
amendments to the federal Animal Welfare Act in 1985. One of the amendments required research
facilities to include provisions to promote the psychological well-being of
nonhuman primates. Infants and young
juveniles are to receive special consideration.
In order to figure out what that meant, the Institute for Laboratory
Animal Research issued a report in 1998 which stated:

We
believe that a well-designed plan to provide for psychological well-being
should … include

Appropriate social
companionship.

Opportunities to
engage in behavior related to foraging, exploration, and other activities
appropriate to the species, age, sex, and condition of the animals.

Housing that permits
suitable postural and locomotor expression.

Interactions with
personnel that are generally positive and not a source of unnecessary
stress.

Freedom from
unnecessary pain and distress.

Clearly this new maternal deprivation research at Madison fails
to promote the psychological well-being of the infant primates, indeed it is actually
designed to undermine it.

The AWA allows exemptions for scientific reasons if
they are approved by an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) (another
of the 1985 AWA amendments required such committees be established). So one
might imagine that an oversight committee would set the bar pretty high for
such exemptions, given the negative attention the research would garner and the
pain and suffering it would cause. One would hope ACUCs would want to be assured
that there is a high likelihood that tangible scientific benefits would result
from harmful research.

This doesn’t appear to be what happened at UW. Indeed, the research in question is described
by one member of the ACUC as “basic science.” In the minutes of one of the
meetings of the oversight committee (here)
the chair of the committee (a veterinarian) is reported to have said that he “is
unsure if the ACUC has the right to tell a PI not to do their research because the research may cause
harm. The ACUC frequently approves protocols that will have adverse effects on
animals.”

Another
senior program veterinarian who was invited to the meeting noted that in other
cases when exemptions are permitted “specific therapeutic or preventative
endpoints can be identified and reached, but in these studies endpoints are
less clear.” Also in the minutes the veterinarian noted, “the behavioral damage
to the animals from this type of study is already well-known."

The
chair of the committee again said he was unsure whether it was the role of the
oversight committee to question NIH-approved scientific research. But NIH
funding requires IACUC approval first.
So what is going on?

The
IACUC is supposed to independently determine whether the minimal standards of
the AWA are being met. Then NIH decides
whether the work is scientifically justified, and NIH review panels tend to
defer to the institutional ACUCs approvals.
If the ACUC is deferring to NIH or, even worse, to the PI, what
oversight role are these committees playing?

A biased one is, as Lawrence Hansen has recently suggested, too prone to “groupthink.”
In a study he recently published, Hansen found a 98% approval
rate for in-house research protocols, and, when those same proposals were given
to committees at other institutions 61% were thought to be problematic in some way. This line by Hansen from a recent
news report sums up his view: "The fact is,
IACUCs as they are set up today will approve virtually anything."

What does this say about the ethicists who serve on
these oversight committees?

Comments

Guest post by Lori Gruen on renewal of maternal deprivation research at Madison

A few days ago Eric linked
to a report
by Lori Gruen (Ethics and Animals blog here; Wesleyan University
website here) on the renewal
of cruel maternal deprivation research on primates. The comments on Eric's post
were such that we asked Lori to write a guest post for us. She graciously
agreed; the post follows: [UPDATED 1:40 pm 16 Oct. See below for contact info for Madison's Provost.]

PAINFUL SCIENTIFIC
FOOLISHNESS

“Major
steps in scientific progress are sometimes followed closely by outbursts of foolishness.
New discoveries have a way of exciting the imagination of the well-meaning and
misguided, who see theoretical potentialities in new knowledge that may prove
impossible to attain.” – Dr.
Sherwin Nuland, Yale School of Medicine

Does the system we have in place to curtail scientific
“outbursts of foolishness” and protect research subjects from “misguided”
scientific curiosity work?

There was no oversight system in place back in the
days when Harry Harlow’s experiments psychologically tormenting baby monkeys
were making news. Surely that sort of
horrible work in which infant primates are taken from their mothers to make
them crazy wouldn’t be approved of today. On my recent visit to the University
of Wisconsin I was shocked to learn otherwise.
The oversight committee chairs told me they have never rejected a
proposal. Not one.

And one of the protocols they did not reject is a renewal
of maternal deprivation research. Disturbingly, ithas been approved by not
one, but two oversight committees. A
psychiatry professor who has a distinguished record of research on anxiety
disorders plans to separate more monkey babies from their mothers, leave them
with wire “surrogates” covered in cloth (a practice developed by Harlow) to
emulate “adverse early rearing conditions,” then pair them with another
maternally deprived infant after 3-6 weeks of being alone. The infants will then be exposed to fearful
conditions. The monkeys in this group
and another group of young monkeys who will be reared with their mothers, will
then be killed and their brains examined. (The experimental protocol is here.)